Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use. Portable electronic devices come in many shapes and sizes, such as cellular telephones (mobile phones), smart telephones (smart phones), Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), tablet computers, or laptop computers, with wireless network communications connectivity, or near-field communications connectivity, such as Bluetooth® capabilities or other electro-magnetic field communication capabilities. These devices may be used in connection with a wide variety of networks, such as Mobitex, DataTAC, GSM/GPRS, CDMA, EDGE, UMTS, and CDMA2000 networks.
Portable electronic devices such as PDAs or smart telephones are generally intended for handheld use and ease of portability. A virtual or a physical keyboard for text input is particularly useful on such handheld devices as such handheld devices are small and therefore have limited space for user input devices. Each key of the keyboard may be associated with a primary character, such as a lower case letter in an alphabet, and a plurality of secondary characters, such as a capital letter, symbols, numbers, or diacritic characters. These secondary characters may be entered using a combination of keys, a special mode switch key, or through selection on a touch screen. However, the efficiency of rendering the secondary characters in the existing devices is limited.
Improvements in a more efficient method of rendering secondary characters are therefore desirable.